


Everybody Dances (With the Grim Reaper)

by AsperJasper



Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Grim Reaper - Freeform, Guns, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Matt is angsty and guilt ridden as per the usual, Violence, but they're not gone this is kinda a ghost fic, he commits murders but he isn't kingpin, is this muderdock?, just....a lot this time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2020-11-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:07:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27480937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsperJasper/pseuds/AsperJasper
Summary: Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.-Norman CousinsOr, the one where Matt spirals after he's too late to save a life.
Relationships: Matt Murdock/Franklin "Foggy" Nelson
Comments: 3
Kudos: 24





	Everybody Dances (With the Grim Reaper)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fiona](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiona/gifts), [Howl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Howl/gifts).



> Sometimes, you spend a couple hours developing an AU that comes out of somebody else's massive brain in a discord chat and sometimes the au is so good that you're briefly possessed by the spirit of somebody with an attention span and so sometimes you stay up until four am to spit out 5k words of sad angst.
> 
> Shoutout to Howl (@modernoracleofdelphi on tumblr), who popped said Grim Reaper Foggy first, and Fiona (@letsgetthisblog and @mattsshapelyass on tumblr), who spat ideas back and forth with us for a few hours, and everyone else in the discord who let us take over the general chat for the sake of this au jajgsjhgf I love you all and this au slaps and was so fun to write!

It starts in the rain.

It’s a Tuesday night, and it’s raining. Pouring. The kind of rain that makes Matt wish tonight he could stay in his apartment with the window open and just listen to the dulled sounds of the city. Rain like this is the closest to peace that he’d ever be able to know, and yet.

His boots slip underneath him as he runs. He doesn’t fall, but he stumbles. His shoulder hits the brick wall on the edge of the building he’s running across, and he feels the rain soak through the suit even more, like he’d just dipped his shoulder in a puddle.

It costs him a precious few seconds, that slip. The rain dulled his senses and he didn’t notice the puddle and he slipped, he stumbled, and so he didn’t get to the alley he was running towards fast enough.

His fist connects with the mugger’s head barely half a second after the crack of the gunshot echoed off the walls, but he knows the bullet flies true. He’s too late. There’s a strangled, cut off sort of shout. The taste of blood is heavy on the air, and Matt turns towards the poor man who’d just been mugged. The mugger runs.

Matt lets him go, desperately kneeling next to the man he’d tried to save, listening helplessly as the breaths slow down. The heart stops.

He’s dead.

Matt slipped in the rain, and now a man is dead. Gone. Stolen from this world for the sake of, if he’d been telling the truth when the mugger demanded his wallet and Matt heard it from five blocks away, forty dollars and an almost maxed-out credit card.

Is that the price of human life?

How can it be?

Matt scrambles up the fire escape, shaking and panicked and out of control, and listens to the cops arrive.

As the scent of blood fades, he tastes the salt of his own tears running down his face.

This is his fault.

He slipped in the rain and now a man is dead. A man he should have been able to save.

His life, his blood, is on Matt’s hands.

* * *

Matt listens carefully the next morning. He needs to know who it was, who the man who was killed for forty dollars and an almost maxed out credit card was. He needs to know because he needs to know what forgiveness to ask for.

Because it isn’t just one life he failed to protect, in the alley in the rain.

He hears, at eleven twenty-one in the morning, the frightened, heartbroken sobs of a mother forced to identify her son’s body.

He failed her, too. He failed Anna Nelson, mother of Franklin Nelson, who has to look at her son’s face and confirm that it is him. He failed the rest of the family he hears break down through the course of the day. Theo Nelson, who tries to hold it together but has to go to a back room to sob where he thinks nobody can hear him. He failed Edward Nelson, who starts praying to a God he doesn’t think is listening as soon as he hears what happened. He failed the grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and nieces and nephews he hears crying over the phone.

It’s Matt’s fault. That’s what keeps ringing in his ears as each new heartbreak hits him like a gunshot.

He slipped in the rain and he failed all of these people and a man is dead.

And it’s his fault.

* * *

Matt goes to the funeral.

He almost can’t force himself to walk through the doors of the church, the guilt twisting in his stomach and making him feel like he’s about to throw up because he’s the cause of this. This service, on a bright, sunny Friday afternoon, shouldn’t be happening. It wouldn’t be happening if he had just paid a little bit more attention, if he’d noticed the puddle on the roof and not slipped in the rain. If he’d started running half a second sooner. If he’d heard it start a moment sooner.

He should have stopped it.

Franklin Nelson shouldn’t have had to die because Matt tried to run in the rain.

But he feels like he has to go. He has to apologize, somehow, to the man who died because of Matt. To his family, if Matt could swallow back the bile that threatened to rise in his throat.

There are a lot of people at the funeral. The voices Matt has listened to for a week and a half in their heartbreak sit near the front, but there are so many others. Matt listens to the stories about Franklin Nelson.

He listens to the watery, tear-stained laughter. The choked back sobs. He smells and tastes the tears of a hundred people, mourning this man who shouldn’t have had to die. Who was stolen from them young, who had so much potential and so much joy and who brought so much laughter to everyone who knew him, everyone who tells a story or whispers a prayer in the church this afternoon.

Matt’s tears are silent, and he doesn’t laugh. His shoulders shake and his lips move in silent, pleading, desperate prayers, and he isn’t sure if he was praying to God or Franklin Nelson for forgiveness.

He barely notices as everyone leaves the church.

He barely notices the strange patch of cold air in the hot room, a strange burst of sensation shaped almost like a person standing near the casket.

When he leaves, his legs shaking from crying and his senses barely at the edge of his awareness, he shakes off the thought of a cold hand briefly pressing into his on his cane.

* * *

Two nights later, Matt puts the mask on again.

He’s sitting on a rooftop when he hears a voice he recognizes. It sends the memory of an echoing gunshot and a dying man racing down his spine, and he’s running towards it before he even thinks about what he’s doing.

This time, he thinks as he listens to his feet pound against the rooftops, this time there is no rain. There is no puddle. No time to stumble, and nothing to stumble on.

Blood is roaring in his ears when he lands behind the mugger who stole Franklin Nelson’s life. The person he was talking to runs, and Matt doesn’t care. He smiles viciously and cracks his knuckles, and he hears the heartbeat take off, smells the nervous sweat, and then he stops thinking.

He hears and feels the bones break. He tastes the blood. Hears the pleading and ignores it.

This time, when he hears the heartbeat stop, his smile gets even more deadly and he climbs back up the fire escape with some kind of horrifying satisfaction burning in his stomach.

He waits, backed up in the shadows and breathing quietly, to make sure the police find the body. That they find the gun tucked in this body’s belt so they can match it to the murder of Franklin Nelson.

He shakes it off as nerves, as a reaction to what he’s just done, when he thinks he feels another cold hand, this time pressing against his cheek. He must be imagining things, he thinks, when there’s this sensation he couldn’t describe but he knows he feels. Like somebody who isn’t really there is pulling something out of the body. Not a physical form, not a body, just that cold patch of human-shaped air, reaching into the dead man’s chest and pulling out something just as non-corporeal as itself.

Matt shakes off the hallucination when the cops arrive.

He runs across the dry rooftops, never missing a single step, and when he gets home he throws up.

Franklin Nelson’s life was worth more than forty dollars and an almost maxed-out credit card.

His killer had no right to steal it.

Matt had only repaid the debt he owed. It’s his fault Franklin Nelson is gone, and he’s started his atonement for that.

But he still throws up.

* * *

Matt knocks on the door of the apartment above Nelson’s Meats on a Wednesday morning.

It’s been two weeks since Franklin Nelson died.

Almost a week since the funeral.

Several days since Matt killed the man who stole Franklin Nelson’s life, and one day since he listened to the Nelson family react to the news that their son’s, brother’s, nephew’s, killer had been found.

Matt’s hand shakes when he knocks.

Anna Nelson opens the door.

"I’m sorry," Matt tries to start, but the tears start falling before he can continue.

"You were at the funeral," Anna says softly, and Matt nods. Manages to choke off the tears and take a deep, shaking breath.

"I was there," he tries to explain. "I didn’t know him but I should have saved him. I should have been there sooner. I’m so sorry."

Anna Nelson should not forgive him.

He’s here because he needs this, he needs them to know that it’s his fault and that he’s sorry. He needs to give them somebody to blame, because he knows he blames himself and he wants them to, too. He wants them to know it was his fault.

He wants them to hate him as much as he hates himself for what’s happened.

He doesn’t expect Anna Nelson to pull him into a tight hug like he hasn’t had in years. To calm his shaking shoulders with her hands and try to reassure him that it wasn’t his fault.

He knows it was, he knows her pain is his fault, but she lets him tell her otherwise because it feels good. It feels good to be soothed. To be pulled inside this warm home and handed plates of food. To be given more stories of Franklin Nelson until he was full to bursting with them.

Anna quietly insists he come back for dinner in a week, and she presses a box of bandaids into his hands.

"Take care of yourself, Matt," she says softly.

A patch of cold air seems to wave goodbye as Matt leaves.

* * *

Three nights after visiting Anna Nelson, Matt wraps his hands in rope.

It’s tight. It presses against the scabs on his knuckles, and he feels them crack and start to bleed again.

This time, as he runs across the dry rooftops towards a warehouse full of evil men, he knows he’s about to kill.

He knows he crossed a line when he killed Franklin Nelson’s murderer, and he doesn’t want to go back. Every time he thinks about what he’s done, he knows killing that man made life better for people. He can’t hurt anyone else, because he doesn’t exist here anymore.

And Matt has been listening to the men in the warehouse planning for months now. He knows what they’re going to do. How many women they’re planning on hurting.

When he drops inside the warehouse, his heart is pounding in his ears, but it isn’t fear. It isn’t hesitation. It’s pure adrenaline, a reaction to the rising heartbeats and scared breaths coming from the men who haven’t seen him yet, but they’ve heard his feet fall.

He’s already grinning when he finds the fusebox and slams the lights off.

When the bones break under his hands, the ropes keep his own fingers from breaking.

He calls 911 on one of their phones when he hears the last heartbeat sputter to a stop, and then he climbs back up to the rooftop to wait for the police to arrive. He’s left evidence out for them to see. The ledgers and phones that certainly had all the information on the human trafficking they were arranging.

He knows he’s when he hears the cops talking about it. They’re just as disgusted with what they find in the books as he is.

They’re also disgusted with him.

"APB on Daredevil. Male, probably white, around 5’11", no known description outside of the devil suit. Suspect in multiple homicides."

Matt doesn’t move from his shadow on the roof until all the cops and coroners and photographers are gone and the warehouse is still and silent again.

He thinks he hears a voice as he slips away towards his apartment.

"I have so much paperwork because of you, Murdock, you stupid bastard."

He knows nobody is there, and he knows the person-shaped impression of cold air that had been sitting next to him on the roof wasn’t real, and so he doesn’t acknowledge it.

If losing his sanity is part of finally making progress in cleaning the streets of Hell’s Kitchen for good, then that’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make.

He will atone for not saving Franklin Nelson, and he will do it by ensuring it won’t happen to anyone else, regardless of the rain or surety of his footsteps on the roof.

* * *

He isn’t careful.

He knows he should be. He should be making sure his blood doesn’t drip, he doesn’t leave anything behind, so that there’s no way to trace the people he kills back to him.

But he isn’t careful, because he finds he doesn’t care.

He’s stopped caring.

He listens. He notices the people who are planning awful things. Doing awful things. Talking about having done awful things. He memorizes their voices, the way they walk, where they live, and he bides his time until the moment is just right.

He lets them hear him coming. He takes pleasure in their fear.

They deserve it.

They’ve scared and hurt and killed and destroyed the lives of so many people, and Matt takes vicious pleasure in hearing their heartbeats stutter, in tasting the terror in their sweat and tears as they plead for their lives, voices cracking.

He doesn’t like who he’s become, or what he’s doing, not really, but he doesn’t throw up when he gets home. He washes the blood off of his face and hands, and he listens to a city that is better off with fewer criminals alive in its underbelly. Fewer abusers there to terrify their victims. Fewer innocent people dying, and more empty funerals of people everybody knew were evil.

He hates himself, but that isn’t new, and he likes the difference he’s making.

He accepts that cold human outline that always seems present when he kills somebody. He figures it’s part of his penance. He’s losing his sanity as he strays further and further from the path he once held himself on, and he accepts it.

He hears that voice, the same as the one at the warehouse, talking to him once in a while. He calls the figure and the voice "Foggy" because that’s what it feels like. Fog forming a human to talk to him in his darkest, most sinful moments, to remind him what he was doing.

"It wasn’t your fault," Foggy says to him, and Matt laughs bitterly. "It wasn’t your fault that I died."

That’s when it clicks, for him, that it isn’t just a random impression of a person he’s imagining.

He’s being haunted, or at least he’s hallucinating being haunted, by Franklin Nelson. The man he should have saved. Would have saved, if it weren’t for a stumble in the rain.

Isn’t that a funny joke?

To know that he’s guilty, to know that it was a slip of his foot that condemned a man to death, and to imagine the man talking to him every time he tries to step forward towards making it up.

But he accepts it. He lets the conversations happen. He feels like he knows Franklin Nelson, now, after dinner with the rest of his family several times. He thinks this imaginary Foggy person, the ghost that seems to follow him around, seems to fit the bill pretty well.

"We could have been friends, you know. If I’d saved you."

"Coulda been friends if we met anyway, Matt. It’s not your fault."

"I slipped. If I had been paying attention, I would have been there in time."

"If I hadn’t stopped to buy a pretzel, I wouldn’t have been there at all." The cold impression of Foggy leans against Matt’s side, almost convincing enough to be real. "You can stop. Stop killing people. You know how much work it is?"

"How would you know?"

"Oh, I don’t mean for you. You can clearly handle it, Mr. Daredevil. I’m talking about my end. None of these deaths are on the official schedule; do you know how much paperwork it takes to make a murder go well?"

"I don’t know what you’re talking about."

"Official Grim Reaper business, buddy. That’s how I get to hang around. Sign a contract, fuck around picking up lost souls on Earth. ’S why I follow you around, always plenty of work. And paperwork."

"Buddy."

"Aren’t you the one who just said we could have been friends? Why not start now." The cold air brushes against his shoulder, like Foggy had just bumped their shoulders together. "Plus, though you absolutely can’t tell my bosses this, it’s kinda fun watching you kill bad guys. You should still stop, though. Before you get caught."

"Why?"

"Because I think you have a hell of a lot more to offer than what you’ve got going on right now."

Matt stops going to dinner at the Nelsons soon after he starts having full conversations with their dead relative. It isn’t fair to them, he thinks, that he comes and gets to pretend to be somebody he isn’t for a few hours, somebody sane and normal and human, before he disappears into the mask and spends the night a murderer.

It isn’t fair, and he won’t be the reason any of them get arrested when he inevitably gets caught. He won’t be. He refuses to hurt that family any more.

* * *

Matt becomes less sure that Foggy is imaginary the longer he floats around.

First, it’s the way other people react. Matt senses the cold air brushing against other people and he senses them flinch away from it, or shiver, run their hands over their arms like they’re trying to get warm.

And it’s the way he talks to Matt. It’s funny, and strange, but talking to this person who doesn’t really exist becomes the only thing he looks forward to anymore.

While Matt sits on a fire escape in the dark, Foggy sits next to him. Matt listens to the city, waiting for his moment to start his next strike, and Foggy tells him stories. About his childhood and family, often, like he’s trying to convince Matt to go back to Nelson family dinners again. Sometimes, he talks about Grim Reaper business, which makes Matt laugh through his nose because those are the stories that convince him most that he really is just going crazy.

Every time Matt kills somebody, Foggy heaves a heavy sigh, and Matt feels the cold air drift over to the body and pull something out of it before releasing it.

"Souls," he explains when Matt asks, and of course. Because Foggy is a Grim Reaper who follows Matt to collect the souls he leaves behind. "Gotta extract 'em from the body before they can be sent off to judgment or whatever. I don’t really know where they go after I let them go."

"Where did you go?"

"I don’t remember. Not anything until the funeral. I signed the contract after that."

"Why?"

"Because. I didn’t want to let go." Foggy sounds sad when he says that, and Matt is reminded of exactly why he’s let himself become what he is. A murderer, because it’s his fault that Foggy died in the first place. "Hey. No need for that expression. It wasn’t your fault, Matty."

And a cold hand presses against his face, and he thinks Foggy might have just kissed his nose.

* * *

Almost a year after the murder of Franklin Nelson, Daredevil is the most feared person in New York.

Matt is used to fear. He’s been used to fear since the first time he ever went out because that was what he did. He scared people into behaving.

And now, he thrives off of the fear. He lets his feet hit the ground harder than necessary, he speaks into the darkness before attacking, he listens to their frantic heartbeats and lets the vicious grin he’s become so familiar with take over his face because they still deserve this. They deserve to die, and he’s no longer afraid to admit it like he once was.

Foggy is still there. He cracks jokes and seems to like making Matt laugh, and Matt enjoys his company. He no longer cares if he’s imagining the ghost or not because it’s pretty much the only real conversations he has anymore.

Tonight, it’s an arms ring.

Matt’s been listening to them plan the deal that is supposed to go down tomorrow night for months, and he knows how many people will die if the gang buying from them gets its hands on the weapons, and so he knows that he has to act tonight.

He drops down from the beam he’s been waiting on for an hour when the last of them arrive. His boots thud against the concrete floor of this basement room, and he hears and tastes the fear like always. There are seven of them and one of him, and yet here they stand. Terrified at the sight of him. His silhouette in the dim light.

"Going somewhere?"

He laughs when one of them does dart for the door. His billy club flies faster than the man can run, and he hits the floor with the sickening crunch of metal on bone.

"Anybody else want to try something stupid?"

That’s when the fight starts for real. The six of them with knees left to stand on launch themselves at him, snarling and growling and ready for a fight. Matt grins at them, even when a fist connects with his nose and he can taste his own blood in his mouth. He grins because he knows they deserve this, and he knows that they are still afraid.

The fight lasts five minutes before it goes wrong. Before he feels a blow connect to his head, and his head snaps around and he sees stars, which is definitely a bad sign considering it’s been almost twenty years since he’s seen anything.

And then…

He’s floating.

Only, not quite. It’s not like falling, there’s no feeling of free-fall in the pit of his stomach. It’s just…nothing. Nothing at all.

There’s no ground beneath his feet. His radar sense is giving no readout at all, like there’s nothing there. Absolutely nothing. No sound, no scent, no taste. No sight, though that’s much less concerning.

No pain.

It’s almost a relief. No sore muscles, no aching lungs, no bruises or cuts, or broken nose.

Just…nothing.

It could be seconds or it could be hours or it could be days that he’s there. In the nothing. Nothing at all. It’s peaceful, almost.

And then a voice.

"It’s not your time yet, Matty. C’mon. You can do it. Get up, Matty, I’m not taking you yet."

And everything explodes back into existence. The pain, the scent and taste and feel of blood, the sounds of the fight. He’s on the ground, two cold hands he knows nobody else can sense tugging at his arms, trying to pull him up while the people he’s fighting kick at him.

He doesn’t know why they don’t just shoot him. Probably because they want the pleasure he gets out of killing somebody this way, this vicious, personal way.

It gives him the chance he needs, though. To allow Foggy to tug him to his feet, to slam out with his fists and feet, to bite at the hands that get too close to his face, and he wins the fight.

One by one, seven heartbeats disappear.

Matt doesn’t wait for the cops anymore. He sprawls on his back on the floor of his apartment. He isn’t sure if everything hurts so bad because of that nothingness in which there had been no pain, or if he’s just hurt that badly from the fight.

"Why didn’t you let me go?" He whispers to Foggy when he feels cold fingertips press against the cut on his head.

"It’s not your time," Foggy says simply. His hands work like an icepack on Matt’s bruises, and he touches each and every one gently. Lovingly. "Not yet."

Matt thinks if Foggy was still alive, if Matt had saved him, they would have fallen in love like this.

Foggy laughs gently, and Matt realizes he said that out loud.

"You don’t have to be alive to love. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here. I would have let go. You’ve got life left to live, Matty, I’m not letting you leave this body until it’s your time."

"When will that be?"

Foggy is quiet, but Matt feels him kiss his forehead.

"I’m tired, Foggy."

"I know, Matt. I know."

* * *

It’s raining again.

It’s a Tuesday night, and it’s raining. Pouring. The kind of rain that makes Matt wish tonight he could stay in his apartment with the window open and just listen to the dulled sounds of the city. Rain like this was the closest to peace that he’d ever be able to know, and yet.

His boots slip underneath him as he runs. He doesn’t fall, but he stumbles. His shoulder hits the brick wall on the edge of the building he’s running across, and he feels the rain soak through the suit even more, like he’d just dipped his shoulder in a puddle.

It’s eerily familiar.

It’s been one year and four months since the murder of Franklin Nelson, and it feels exactly the same tonight.

Matt doesn’t fall, but he stumbles, and somehow, he knows.

He knows that he’s about to be too late. Not to save somebody else, but to save himself.

They hear him slip, and it’s too early for them to hear him.

The gunshot goes off before he even hits the ground.

And it’s empty again. It’s nothing. Nothing under his feet. Nothing around him. No pain. No scent, or taste, or sound. Just…nothing. Nothing at all.

And Foggy’s voice doesn’t urge him to get up, this time.

So he just…stays. Waits. For what, he has no idea, but he waits.

And then he feels it.

It’s strange. He doesn’t realize that he isn’t breathing, that his heart isn’t beating, until he feels it. Like there’s a rope tied around his heart, and it’s pulling him. It’s a feeling, an emotion, as much as it is something physical, and it’s like knowledge just…comes to him. And he lets the pull drag him along.

And he understands.

He appears next to a casket. He still can’t see, which almost makes him laugh. What the point of dying and getting to be a ghost if he can’t see? But it’s comforting, too, because he knows how to navigate the world like this. With his other senses, not his eyes. He’s not sure he’d remember how to use sight even if he had it.

He knows, somehow, that it’s his funeral. That the closed casket he’s standing next to has the body of Matthew Michael Murdock inside of it.

He kind of expected this. He knows Foggy was at his own funeral. That was the first time Matt had ever felt his freezing cold hands, after all.

He didn’t expect anyone to come to his funeral.

But here they are. Anna and Edward Nelson, not as heartbroken as they had been at their son’s funeral, but sad nonetheless. And the other members of the Nelson family, who Matt hasn’t talked to in at least half a year, when he decided that he wouldn’t hurt them anymore.

And other people from Hell’s Kitchen. People who had been hurt by the people Matt killed, so many of them that almost everybody in the church is sitting close enough to touch somebody else. Every pew is full, and Matt hasn’t felt comfortable being inside a church in a while but he’s here and somehow it feels right.

And he understands.

What makes a ghost isn’t unfinished business, because if it were, Matt wouldn’t be here. He’d be out on the street, looking for more people who needed to die, because he still feels guilty for what he’d done. He still feels as though it’s his fault Foggy died, and he still feels like he owes it to people to protect them. So it can’t be unfinished business.

It must be this. The sharp, bright sting of sadness that Matt can somehow feel in every person in this room. The stories people are whispering to each other about how Daredevil helped them. Abusers who went missing only to be found in the Hudson. Neighborhoods torn apart by gang violence and recruitment until the leaders were found dead in an alley. Rapists killed before they had the chance to get very far at all.

It was this bond, this strange tenuous string wrapped around Matt’s unbeating heart, that tied him here. Not his body, not his mission, but the people he’d helped, the people who cared about him.

He hadn’t even known anybody cared about him at all.

And yet.

Here they are. Mourning him.

He listens to the entire service, to every story, to the way they talk about him. Most of them don’t seem to like how he’d done it, but everyone seemed to agree that he’d made a difference.

That makes Matt feel better than he has since the night Foggy died. It makes him feel like maybe he hadn’t let himself become as evil as he’d feared while he was alive, because clearly other people see the difference he made, too.

As people leave the church, a hand slips into his.

For the first time ever, Foggy’s hand doesn’t feel like ice. They’re the same temperature, now.

* * *

"Why am I still here, Foggy?" Matt asks. They’re sitting on the floor of Matt’s apartment, which is currently being emptied by the NYPD, everything being carefully filed away into evidence. All the proof that the blind man named Matt Murdock had been Daredevil, finally seeing the light of day. "Shouldn’t I be…I don’t know. Being judged?"

"Eh." Foggy shrugs. His form is much easier to read now that Matt is the same as him. "There are some pretty impressive loopholes in afterlife law. As long as people care about you, you can hang out with me. And people care about you."

"I’m not a Grim Reaper, though."

"Nah. And you shouldn’t be." Foggy smiles and Matt loves that he can tell that, now. "You’d suck at it. Too many rules."

Matt laughs, and one of the cops bagging his stack of Braille books two feet away looks around like she’d heard him.

"So what am I supposed to do now? Just follow you around like a poor lost puppy for the rest of eternity?"

"That’s what I’ve been doing since I died. Your turn." Foggy leans in, touches his forehead to Matt’s. "I have some ideas."

"Oh, yeah?"

"You know the little girl whose dad you were planning on…taking care of?"

"Yes."

"You’re not bound by my rules. Doesn’t matter if it’s his time if you’re the one doing it."

Matt grins.

Foggy laughs.

"A rogue reaper."

"Hey. If you do the killing, and all I do is collect, technically, we’re not breaking any rules."

Matt laughs again.

"Are you encouraging me to kill people now?"

"Seems to work." Foggy shrugs. "And I’ll be a lot less lonely with you here all the time."

"You want me around," Matt says in wonder. "You’re finding loopholes because you want me around."

"Duh." Foggy snorts, he kisses Matt quickly. It’s not a surprise, but it is, kind of. "You didn’t think I was gonna let you go that easy, did you?"

"No. I guess I didn’t."

"Good. Because I’m bad at letting go."

"I know, Foggy." Matt laughs softly. "And I’m glad."

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I'm Asper! I'm here, I probably should have been doing schoolwork instead of writing (or sleeping. i should have been sleeping ajhgsjhgfjhs), but I didn't do that, so here we are!
> 
> Thanks for reading! Feel free to leave a comment!


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